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A living room (above) and dining table (below) from one of the suites.
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Instead he put George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg to work. Though Sternlicht
was so intent on making a splash in Times Square that he interviewed Diller
+ Scofidio for the project, he concluded that the visionary duo lacked
the experience to pull it off, especially under the time pressures. Yabu
Pushelberg had a limited record in hospitality, but it had just been chosen
to renovate Tiffany's Fifth Avenue flagship store and designed the
cosmetics floor for Bergdorf Goodman. "We liked their sensibility the
best--their use of texture, colors," Sternlicht says. Hired in fall
2000, the designers began work only in September. The budget was $50-$60
million.
Partnering with Brennan Beer Gorman/Architects, Yabu Pushelberg introduced
sleek materials and a smoky palette. Out with the dark wood and mohair typical
of some early Ws (and of many other boutiques, thanks to the French designer
Christian Liaigre's usually uncredited influence); in with glowing
resin nightstands, glass desks, and gray tones that grow paler as they climb
up guest-room walls. Snipping the head off any unspoken comparison with
Schrager's aesthetic guru, Pushelberg notes, "Starck started the boutique
trend years ago--there was no point to out-Starck Starck." In other
words, no overscale furnishings or other flights of whimsy characteristic
of the grizzled French cherub.
Whether cursed or blessed by a schedule that gave no quarter to the baroque,
Yabu Pushelberg somehow made the W cool yet approachable. The 509 rooms
are silvery with reflective glass--the headboards are ceiling-high
mirrors--and yet the device doesn't seem tricky or, worse yet, disco. The
rooms appear effortlessly bigger than an average 350 square feet, and the
mirrors reflect stunning views. To prevent the bathrooms from feeling
like crawl spaces, Sternlicht first proposed that a curtain divide
them from the rooms. Yabu Pushelberg opted for sliding translucent glass,
and designed a branching piece of metal attached to the sink to hold washcloths,
shampoo, and a face mirror.
Space constraints are such that the reception area occupies the seventh
floor in the building's narrow footprint. Blue Fin consumes levels
one and two. (Following W's practice of partnering with noted restaurateurs,
the 350-seat eatery is run by Stephen Hanson, who founded a family of New
York restaurants with the surname Grill--Coconut, Blue Water, Ocean, and
Atlantic.) Six conference rooms take up the fourth floor.
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The regular rooms (floor plan above) feature this bathroom (below right)
and bed (below left).
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It was Sternlicht's idea to put a waterfall in the small ground-floor
elevator lobby. It pours over a glass ceiling and down the sides of glass
walls, casting rippling shadows on the floor. He says he wanted to
rinse away Times Square's frantic energy. If this decompression chamber
doesn't do the trick, true visual Prozac awaits in the seventh-floor
reception lobby: a 6,000-square-foot flow of snowy white floors
and walls punctuated by white-leather benches that wrap around columns.
"A designer's natural inclination in Times Square is to be bigger than
life," Pushelberg says. "Our thought was the opposite--an oasis."
And yet it skillfully avoids monotony. You can't miss the reception desk;
it's set in a glowing black niche. Or the gift shop, which W has ramped
up by offering a weirdly edited selection of lingerie, Kate Spade bags,
barbells, and Tylenol. Athough the shop is tucked in the back, you have
to pass it to reach the rest room. The lobby bar is made of garden-variety
stones set in resin and topped with a slab of composite cement (even outsiders
make their way to this freestanding watering hole).
The hotel offers three other bars, two in the Blue Fin and one in the Whiskey,
the subgrade nightclub run by Rande Gerber, who also oversees several other
W drinking venues. (He is described in the hotel's literature rather alarmingly
as a "nightlife czar" but is perhaps best known as the spouse
of Cindy Crawford.) Taking up space once filled by Club USA, a popular
1990s club, it offers a screening room and a dance floor composed of
squishy multicolor squares that change hues when foot pressure is applied.
Now that the hotel is finished, it's a matter of seeing who shows up.
In December commerce secretary Donald Evans refused to grant hoteliers disaster
relief in the form of travel credits or deferred payroll taxes for their
employees. Brighter news came in January from Condé Nast Traveler's
annual gold list. Polling readers' hotel preferences, the list cited more
Starwood properties than those of any other hotel company, including the
Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco Ws.
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David Rockwell designed this earlier W, in the former Guardian Life
building in Union Square, making the most of the lobby's extant Moderne
staircase (above).
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Starwood is moving ahead to open Ws in San Diego, Mexico City, and Seoul
next year. A project in Miami, across the street from the Delano hotel on
South Beach, is stalled because of a dispute with Schrager, the Delano's
owner. (The spat--not the first among the rival hoteliers--is over
the proposed W's size, but Sternlicht believes he may have resolved it with
a plan to build two buildings, one behind the other.) Denver and Dallas
are also prospective sites, and Sternlicht is working on a line of W resorts,
probably launching in the Caribbean. Reminded that a Starwood executive
had divulged plans in March 2001 for as many as 70 Ws, he says, "fifty
or sixty in five years is not out of the realm of possibility."
Ws have evolved during the last three years, a natural outgrowth of painful
lessons. Materials specified for the first hotel, designed by
the Rockwell Group, have not stood up to heavy wear; the lobby carpet has
to be replaced every six months. And Sternlicht regrets some excesses of
free-spending designers (he declines to give examples on the record). More
important, change is built into the company's brand strategy. "We're
not like the Coca-Cola can, which is always going to be red and white,"
says Theresa Fatino, Starwood's vice president of design and brand development.
Instead she encapsulates the company's identity in descriptions of bedding
thicknesses, thread counts, and "hot" bars.
This flexibility invites fuzziness--what exactly is a W? A tub full
of cocoa? A bowl of apples on a reception desk? A beefcake bellboy in leather?
It threatens disputes between in-house brand managers and external designers--pointing
to a guest-room pillow inscribed with the rhinestone message "Wish."
Pushelberg wants it known, "That wasn't our idea." But the attitude
may just preserve the company in hard times. Dancing the line between boutique
and chain, unpredictable novelty and dependable service provider, watering
hole and resting place, W might stand for winning the heart
of the market share.
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